Adobe's Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will give developers access to new APIs on …

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New versions of Adobe Flash Player and AIR will be arriving by October, Adobe announced in a press release today. Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 are intended to provide “console-like quality” to game developers on PC platforms and improve performance on Android phones, and will be accompanied by support in the Flash Builder and Flex development tools by the end of the year.

The new versions of Flash and AIR will have hardware-accelerated rendering for 2D and 3D graphics up to 1,000 times faster than Flash Player 10 and AIR 2, Adobe said in a press release. The package will include the ability to display 1080p video with Flash-based apps on iOS devices with H.264 hardware decoding, as well as APIs for using accelerometers and near-field communications chips.

Captive runtime will also be a new feature, and users will no longer need to have pop-ups pestering them to update their players yet again. Adobe is working with Microsoft in hopes that Flash can eventually appear on the Windows Phone platform, though no date is set; likewise, the company is also trying to improve Flash in capable Android phones.

We’re not so sure about the renewed commitment to “console-like quality”—PC games are good in their own right. Still, the renewed commitment to mobile platforms is promising, and yetanother indicator that the company is determined not to let any of the mobile platforms slip by.

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

44 Reader Comments

Is it really coming to iOS devices? That comment in the middle of the article seemed mystifying. Is that a change to their server/streaming solution or something? More details on that aspect would be welcome.

It also seems like Adobe is going to have to make a hard sell to Microsoft to get Flash on WM7, since IE10 is looking to ditch plug-ins under the Metro interface (i.e. the general stuff that WP7 uses, right?).

But given the overall lack of progress on the mobile front it seems like Adobe may be exerting a lot of resources on a market area they've already seemingly lost.

Is it really coming to iOS devices? That comment in the middle of the article seemed mystifying. Is that a change to their server/streaming solution or something? More details on that aspect would be welcome.

You can package AIR apps to iOS. Hence "Flash-based". That's different than having Flash in the browser.

And of course... forgot to mention the x64 version, which became finally true. If you install that version, keep in mind it combines binaries for both, x86 & x64. That's why the size ( 7.7MB ) is double.

Note that the latest Nvidia Drivers, claim better Flash 11 support. So, I guess would be better to update those drivers, likewise.

The package will include the ability to display 1080p video with Flash-based apps on iOS devices with H.264 hardware decoding, as well as APIs for using accelerometers and near-field communications chips.

This is incorrect Ars. Adobe AIR 3 has a new API so that you can write native code that will communicate with your AIR app and Adobe gives near-field communication chips as an example of this. However, native code needs to be written for each platform until Adobe plugs this in with a proper AIR API. Since this isn't available on all platforms just yet is why it's likely there isn't an AIR API. However, the big thing about this is that no longer will an AIR app be blocked from using the latest feature just introduced in the latest SDK.

Casey Johnston wrote:

Captive runtime will also be a new feature, and users will no longer need to have pop-ups pestering them to update their players yet again.

This is also incorrect, this is for Adobe AIR and means the developer has the choice on whether or not to include the AIR runtime on Android, Windows or Mac. On iOS it already does this on default and RIM's Playbook the AIR runtime is part of the OS. However, not all developers will use this feature as it means the app or game is bigger as it needs to include the runtime with it. So if you have Adobe AIR installed, this means you will still have updates, especially if you are using an app that does not take advantage of Captive Runtime.

0.5x faster also meets this definition. Sorry, we've been there with broadband speeds. If it went over 9000, I'd be more interested.

What Adobe is talking about here, is the speed it can do 3D graphics. Before it was really slow asall the Flash 3D frameworks were software based (so using ActionScript), with the exception of making a flat square 3D. Now they have a proper 3D engine, with hardware acceleration using OpenGL & DirectX on Windows, so Flash can do as Adobe is advertising console level graphics.

The jump in speed for 3D graphics is like going from Super Nintendo like 3D graphics to Playstation 2 (not quite yet the level of PS3 or XBox360, but I think a bit better than the Wii).

Also note that there is a number of 2D frameworks already using the new 3D engine, so any of games using these frameworks will also get a huge speed boost. Any existing Flash games will need to update their code to access the new 3D engine to get the speed boost, so it's not like all Flash content will speed up when users install Flash Player 11.

Captive runtime will also be a new feature, and users will no longer need to have pop-ups pestering them to update their players yet again.

This could be the single biggest improvement in Flash. Having to click through those annoying legal disclaimers up to several times a week across several machines had me wishing for the death of Flash more than any pro-HTML5 argument ever could.

Captive runtime will also be a new feature, and users will no longer need to have pop-ups pestering them to update their players yet again.

This could be the single biggest improvement in Flash. Having to click through those annoying legal disclaimers up to several times a week across several machines had me wishing for the death of Flash more than any pro-HTML5 argument ever could.

Unfortunately, the article is badly written and this isn't true. This is just an option for Adobe AIR 3 and has nothing to do with Flash Player 11.

However, personally I love the way Chrome has integrated Flash Player 11 so that it updates silently behind the scenes. I wish all browsers would implement a similar solution to this and not just for Flash but for all plugins. More so for security concerns than access to the latest features. Adobe is generally pretty quick in releasing quickly an update to Flash Player to patch up any security problems.

Good news about Winphone and Android, but not enough. That should be their primary focus. Instead of introducing more features onto a shrinking platform, Adobe should focus on stopping the platform from shrinking-- which would mean working with mobile OS holders and hardware developers to get their flash plugins to work better. Flash/AIR, as a platform, would be healthier if they completely froze the feature set and addressed stability, security and performance issues instead.

Not all of those things, especially performance issues, are entirely Adobe's fault. It doesn't matter. Adobe should be bending over backward to get Flash everywhere it can, even if it means helping hardware and OS devs correct their own mistakes. Adobe has much more to lose.

Is it really coming to iOS devices? That comment in the middle of the article seemed mystifying. Is that a change to their server/streaming solution or something? More details on that aspect would be welcome.

They announced a week or two ago that the new version of Flash Media Server will output H.264 using http live streaming for iOS and other devices without Flash. And you've been able to cross-compile to iOS from Flash/AIR for a while now.

So no, Flash isn't coming to iOS, but they have some solutions that can deliver Flash-based content - with varying degrees of success. For instance, Machinarium was a native Flash game that was recompiled for iOS using Air. The memory requirements are so high it'll only run on the iPad 2; it's a really nice looking game, but not *that* nice.

So no, Flash isn't coming to iOS, but they have some solutions that can deliver Flash-based content - with varying degrees of success. For instance, Machinarium was a native Flash game that was recompiled for iOS using Air. The memory requirements are so high it'll only run on the iPad 2; it's a really nice looking game, but not *that* nice.

So no, Flash isn't coming to iOS, but they have some solutions that can deliver Flash-based content - with varying degrees of success. For instance, Machinarium was a native Flash game that was recompiled for iOS using Air. The memory requirements are so high it'll only run on the iPad 2; it's a really nice looking game, but not *that* nice.

They really are quite astonishingly incompetent. I'd love to know where they find their developers.

They've demoed 3D games running on mobile devices quite smoothly as the 3D models are completely using the GPU to render.

Machinarium requires an iPad 2 because it's a heavy graphical game built for the desktop 2 years ago. As far as I understand it, the memory requirements have nothing to do with 2D animations but loading all the massive graphics into memory. They would have run into the same problems say making it a native app for OSX 2 years ago and then trying to port that same code to the iPad.

So no, Flash isn't coming to iOS, but they have some solutions that can deliver Flash-based content - with varying degrees of success. For instance, Machinarium was a native Flash game that was recompiled for iOS using Air. The memory requirements are so high it'll only run on the iPad 2; it's a really nice looking game, but not *that* nice.

They really are quite astonishingly incompetent. I'd love to know where they find their developers.

They've demoed 3D games running on mobile devices quite smoothly as the 3D models are completely using the GPU to render.

Machinarium requires an iPad 2 because it's a heavy graphical game built for the desktop 2 years ago. As far as I understand it, the memory requirements have nothing to do with 2D animations but loading all the massive graphics into memory. They would have run into the same problems say making it a native app for OSX 2 years ago and then trying to port that same code to the iPad.

Sure. But when Adobe Evangelists are trumpeting the success of Machinarium on the App Store as a victory for their cross-platform tools, it should be noted that they're celebrating a lazy-ass port of a game that would have run much better in native code.

It took that much to push Adobe to innovate with Flash, eh? Finally this is the Flash we need, but there was no way Flash would have ever evolved this way naturally in an environment devoid of competition.

So no, Flash isn't coming to iOS, but they have some solutions that can deliver Flash-based content - with varying degrees of success. For instance, Machinarium was a native Flash game that was recompiled for iOS using Air. The memory requirements are so high it'll only run on the iPad 2; it's a really nice looking game, but not *that* nice.

They really are quite astonishingly incompetent. I'd love to know where they find their developers.

They've demoed 3D games running on mobile devices quite smoothly as the 3D models are completely using the GPU to render.

Machinarium requires an iPad 2 because it's a heavy graphical game built for the desktop 2 years ago. As far as I understand it, the memory requirements have nothing to do with 2D animations but loading all the massive graphics into memory. They would have run into the same problems say making it a native app for OSX 2 years ago and then trying to port that same code to the iPad.

Sure. But when Adobe Evangelists are trumpeting the success of Machinarium on the App Store as a victory for their cross-platform tools, it should be noted that they're celebrating a lazy-ass port of a game that would have run much better in native code.

It would have been much better had they re-written the whole thing from scratch with mobile in mind either done in Flash or native code. If they native code loads over 100 megs of graphics into memory, it would still have been slow. So it's not a native vs Flash issue, it's a desktop versus mobile issue.

However, it's a very small indie company and they already spent 3 years making the original game, they didn't have any games as I'm aware of on the iPad. So I don't think they would have even considered redoing the game in Flash or native. With it's success, hopefully their next game will be built from the ground up with mobile in mind.

That said, it's a success for Adobe AIR because many discounted or were not even aware that Flash content could get onto the iTunes App Store. Or though that Apple wouldn't prompt a Flash-based game, when Apple featured the game as iPad Game of the Week in iTunes.

Politifact, a Flex application built with mobile in mind and got to the top of the iTunes News apps is a better example, but games like Machinarium are more attention getting.

They announced a week or two ago that the new version of Flash Media Server will output H.264 using http live streaming for iOS and other devices without Flash. And you've been able to cross-compile to iOS from Flash/AIR for a while now.

Which is the exact opposite of how it should work. It should deliver to HTML5 by default (no plug-ins, better performance, no downsides at all!), and fall-back to Flash for those outdated browsers that don't support HTML5.

We’re not so sure about the renewed commitment to “console-like quality”—PC games are good in their own right.

Think about it though, do you really want to download an 8 gig SWF file? I would assume it possible and 3D Flash has looked pretty good every time I've seen it but at the end of the day it's still Flash. The option to say, build BF3 in Flash would be great, but it's still just a Flash game. Maybe they were looking at it that way...or it just might not totally support Dx11.

longerlife wrote:

The Unity engine is also being ported to deliver 3D Flash games in the browser...

Imagine being able to play game demos via Flash regardless of the intended platform. This announcement actually isn't a surprise as the Unity web player was just announced to be on it's way out the door. Though I sort of wonder if HTML5 would make any more sense for Unity... Granted 95% of the internet already has a Flash plugin so that makes that idea really approachable (and gives you a great set of tools for yes...Flash games too) though if HTML5 could match that then the user wouldn't need any plugin in theory.

Either way, great news. Been waiting for Flash 3D, nice to see it set a date finally.

They announced a week or two ago that the new version of Flash Media Server will output H.264 using http live streaming for iOS and other devices without Flash. And you've been able to cross-compile to iOS from Flash/AIR for a while now.

Which is the exact opposite of how it should work. It should deliver to HTML5 by default (no plug-ins, better performance, no downsides at all!), and fall-back to Flash for those outdated browsers that don't support HTML5.

Flash Media Server isn't used for typical Flash video, but streaming content like Hulu. There isn't any way to stream the video in HTML5. What Adobe is actually doing on iOS is using QuickTime to stream the content. So this wouldn't work in browsers without Quicktime installed.

Now Adobe's Dreamweaver has a way to push video to HTML5's video tag (assuming it supports h.264, so IE9 & Safari only) and fall back to Flash. However, this is when you aren't streaming the content put just pointing to a video file.

Completely agree. Adobe Air and Flash both spell AVOID in flashing red letters to me. (I'd even go so far as to say AVOID with blink and marquee tags.) Adobe seem to be doing nothing to improve the situation, though we've seen the claims about improved performance made for every release in recent memory. Either they have no issue repeatedly lying about making an effort or they just don't have anyone capable of making Flash efficient.

Will Microsoft happily put aside dreams of Silverlight ubiquity to work with Adobe getting this crap on their mobile devices? Remains to be seen.

As for aspiring to "console-like" quality... true for some values of "console", of course.

So no, Flash isn't coming to iOS, but they have some solutions that can deliver Flash-based content - with varying degrees of success. For instance, Machinarium was a native Flash game that was recompiled for iOS using Air. The memory requirements are so high it'll only run on the iPad 2; it's a really nice looking game, but not *that* nice.

They really are quite astonishingly incompetent. I'd love to know where they find their developers.

That has almost nothing to do with Flash itself and everything to do with the bloat that gets added when you try to cross-compile ActionScript to Obj-C and expect it to perform the same. It's the cross compile that kills it.

Adobe seem to be doing nothing to improve the situation, though we've seen the claims about improved performance made for every release in recent memory. Either they have no issue repeatedly lying about making an effort or they just don't have anyone capable of making Flash efficient.

Says the iPad owning Mac user..... (bitter much?)

Adobe has drastically improved the performance of Flash, have you seen any stage video recently?

...but of course you don't want Flash to be good, you desperately want it to be terrible, in fact you don't want it to exist at all... because your iPad won't display it, and we all know who to blame for that don't we...

I don't see what your point is, other than Flash is popular, it gets targeted by nefarious types and Adobe patches security problems, the same could be said doubly for Windows and I don't hear people calling for it to "die".

From your link: "There are reports that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in active targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking on a malicious link delivered in an email message", here's some advise don't click strange email links....

I have still never met or spoken to ANYONE who has had their security compromised by Flash, despite being such an apparently strong attack vector, please let me know if you have. BTW Less than a week ago Google patched 49 vulnerabilities in Chrome (not the 6 Adobe patched).

because your iPad, TouchPad, Playbook, and just about every mobile handset up until very recently cannot display it consistently or smoothly, and we all know who to blame for that don't we...

T,ftfy.

By taking the words "because your iPad"....<deleted what I wrote> ending ...."and we all no who to blame for that don't we..." and putting lots of your own, (unrelated to what I was saying), words in the middle, does not seem very clever. It is deliberately misrepresenting me both in SUBJECT and meaning. Plus what you wrote (and attributed to me) is simply FALSE! Please edit out this post.

This is the ORIGINAL point I made:

...but of course you don't want Flash to be good, you desperately want it to be terrible, in fact you don't want it to exist at all... because your iPad won't display it, and we all know who to blame for that don't we...

(PS T,ftfy, should only be used when someone says something the opposite of you believe to be true, you cannot just grab a few words of someone's post change the subject completely and attribute it to them)

(PS T,ftfy, should only be used when someone says something the opposite of you believe to be true, you cannot just grab a few words of someone's post change the subject completely and attribute it to them)

I guess your sarcasm detector is not working today.

As for your original words, "because your iPad won't display it, and we all know who to blame for that don't we...", I assume you are referring to Adobe, because they sure as shit could not get Flash working reliably on any mobile devices when the iPad was released.

You seem to be deliberately avoiding that reality, despite all evidence that this was in fact the way it has played out in tech history. No amount of present-day cheerleading can change that.